L A OBRA DEL MATEMÁTICO

Unlike her colleagues Cecilia and Lorraine, Simone occasionally uses corpus tools as a language user herself, that is, to find out information that she needs outside of the L2

teaching/learning environment. “I might look up something if … I want to see some collocations for vocabulary, [so] instead of using a dictionary, I might have gone to Compleat Lexical Tutor” (S1-53). She also shares her knowledge about corpus linguistics with non-native speaking friends outside the field of teaching, “very proficient language learners [whom] I've told about it, and they think it's just amazing” (S1-53).

As a language learner (French and Arabic), she did not have any experience using corpus tools, nor during her coursework in applied linguistics. As mentioned above, she and another teacher audited one corpus linguistics course many years after receiving her master’s degree. She recalled that auditing the course “was [her colleague’s] idea, bless her heart, and it was like, ok, this is something that wasn't available when I was a student so let's take advantage of it, and it was really enlightening” (S1-61), and this was where she felt she finally began to consider ways to incorporate corpus tools in her teaching. Since then, she has worked with several colleagues to add a few corpus-based activities into her writing classes, though not to the degree that she would like.

Prior to our semester together, Simone had experience using the Compleat Lexical Tutor, COCA, and the Longman grammar books (Biber et al., 2002; Biber et al., 1999), which was the result of the use of these materials in the audited corpus linguistics class. She felt that the use of online corpus tools (e.g., COCA, the Compleat Lexical Tutor) were the most useful corpus topics related to her teaching for the following reasons: it could be applied directly to her classroom teaching, the concepts were easy to understand, she had a personal interest in the topic, it helped her develop classroom materials, and it energized students. She had been interested in trying to figure out how to incorporate the Longman student grammar book with her students, but has not been able to do that, citing lack of time and difficulty in fitting it in a prescriptive curriculum that downplays grammar in the structure and composition courses (S1-69). She has also presented papers with other teachers describing the results of her use of corpus tools in her writing classes at several teacher conferences over the past few years.

From Simone’s perspective, the IEP offers a neutral environment concerning teacher use of corpus tools. As she explained, “I think that [the IEP administration] might be open to it if

they were presented with something… [and] I think if … the administration were approached with a proposal to do x-y-z they would listen to it. I think they're definitely open to new ideas” regarding corpus tools (S1-77). Further, while she sees the program as open to using corpus tools, she does not see any real support there, other than offering an occasional workshop.

In general, prior to our study, Simone saw corpus tools in a positive light, especially in the areas of vocabulary, grammar, and fostering student autonomy (S1-71). Her outlook on how she can use corpus tools is optimistic, though she expressed concern that many of her colleagues do not receive enough knowledge or have opportunities to experiment with them.

I think, what a cool thing it is and, looking at how language is used with those tools that are available has been really interesting to me, and I also think there is so much more I don't know. I like it- I don't feel afraid of it. Again, I wish I had more time to play with it more, and this isn't really what you asked, but when I feel like I know enough about it to actually do something with it, and then I realize how- the opposite of it- how many [teachers] still have no idea what it is. (S1-51)

Perhaps in part for this reason, she is also eager to engage other teachers in her journey to learn more about using corpus tools. She sees collaboration as the most powerful component of learning about new approaches.

One of the weaknesses of anything [in teaching] is you get bored with it, so I think introducing anything new can be challenging and interesting, so yeah, I mean… with the right support it's great, even though it might take more time to incorporate that, but again, coming back to collaboration, if the person likes to collaborate and is able to learn about it and has the right support and can learn about what's - what are you actually asking teachers to do, I think it's fine. But I guess… for me, yeah, but there could be people that are not interested because they're afraid of doing something new. But I'm glad you're doing this collaboratively because I feel like every time I've done corpus stuff in class that … I do it … and then it's hard to get back to it. You know, it's hard to continue it, like what can we do next? How can I make it interesting for the students? (S1-83-85) One issue that some researchers feel has been under-researched in language teacher cognition research is teacher affect (Childs, 2011; Mullock, 2006; Zembylas, 2005). Simone’s description here of fighting off boredom or feeling afraid about trying something new reflects

this concern. Simone also emphasizes two of her areas of concern as a teacher: creating a collaborative space with colleagues, and addressing issues of student engagement.

6.3.2 Planning out possible corpus tools

As we first began discussing using corpus tools in Simone’s class, she expressed interest that Nancy, her colleague who was teaching the other section of the course, be involved in the corpus working session to develop a plan and integrate it into the lesson. Because collaboration is such an integral part of Simone’s teaching practice and decision-making, it was agreed that including Nancy would be positive for the lesson plan and also for the study.

Simone identified several needs for this group of students at this point in the semester in this course. In considering ways to improve the classroom dynamic and to address their overall language needs, she wanted them to engage more with each other by generating real discussion about the topics that they would write about. Another important need that Simone identified was building their vocabulary during the planning/researching, drafting, and revising phases of the writing assignment. The assignment was the collaboratively-produced unit that focused on events and issues from the 1960s in the US, a relatively unknown topic for the students. Part of the reasoning behind choosing this set of possible topics was that it would require them to do library research on unfamiliar content, which was one of the learning outcomes. It also allowed for a focus on other learning outcomes, such as organizing ideas and providing examples and explanations in their writing.

The writing task is to describe a specific event or person from that decade and,

specifically, the essay will be an introduction, background paragraph, overview of the 1960s in general, and then the connection to the particular event, let's say, the National Organization of Women was invented. Not just to describe the organization and everything about it, but more that AND what was the significance of it in that year? Whatever year it was, for example, 1967, so they have to make a connection to a few other things going on that year, and why was it instrumental that this happened then? So it's not just a description. If they took Martin Luther King or John Kennedy, it's not just a

biography but what was significant about those people in the year- in a specific year. So if they did John Kennedy's assassination, and they describe that event- well, what else happened connected to that? You know, Lyndon Johnson came in, legislation got changed which led to the end of the Vietnam War. So it's a little bit broader, and it's resource-based. Up until this point, we [teachers] have provided the sources, but we're going to the library for orientation tomorrow and [the students] are going to have to find their own sources and then… the other teacher and I will be doing summarizing and paraphrasing activities also. (S2-33)

I suggested that students could identify several AWL vocabulary items from their rough drafts and then seek out common patterns, and then use the lexicogrammatical patterns to write new sentences about their 1960s topic. Another suggestion was to consider creating a corpus of student-collected source readings, as suggested by Reppen (2010), or a corpus of the students’ essays as suggested by Bennett (2010).

Simone’s first idea, however, was to focus on keywords, which are those words within a text or groups of texts “whose frequency is unusually high in comparison with some norm” that can be useful in identifying important specialized vocabulary (O'Keefe et al., 2007, pp. 12-13). Using the Compleat Lexical Tutor’s “Keywords Extractor” tool (described below in Section 6.3.3), a keyword list is generated when the user inputs a text, and then the online software compares the frequency of words to the frequency within another corpus. An example keyword list, the top ten keywords from an overview article about the 1960s, is shown in Table 23. As Cobb (n.d.) explains on the results page of the website, “the number accompanying each word… represents the number of times more frequent that word is in your text than in… [a] general reference corpus, [which in the Compleat Lexical Tutor] is the 10-million word spoken section of the British National Corpus” (para. 1). In the list of keywords from the 1960s article in Table 23, antiwar has a ‘keyness’ of 1921.00 and Vietnam has 1601.00, and so on. This numerical information may be useful for researchers but could be confusing for learners and teachers.

Table 23 - 1960s keyword list (top ten keywords using the Keywords Extractor tool) Rank Keyness Word

(1) 1921.00 antiwar (2) 1601.00 Vietnam (3) 240.13 militant (4) 205.86 reforms (5) 192.13 injustice (6) 192.10 poverty (7) 147.77 commitment (8) 131.00 johnson (9) 80.04 draft (10) 74.86 rights

Simone wanted to examine keywords so the students could “look at the resources they found and they [could try] to establish the vocabulary that would be useful in their essay” (S2- 33). She was concerned that trying to create the corpus of either student readings or student writing would take too much time, and while she liked the idea of focusing on AWL words, she felt it was more important for students to build specific vocabulary for their topics, and that the best way to do that would be to focus on keywords.

As one way to address another of her identified needs, that students interact more with each other, Simone decided to make the activity collaborative for the students, requiring them to work in small groups on similar topics. This served the purpose of increasing oral

communication while also allowing students to learn more key vocabulary about their topics. She also felt she could integrate keywords more smoothly into her lesson plan because the students had been working on gathering their source materials, so they would have texts that they could then take keywords from. She felt more comfortable with examining keywords because she had experience having students complete similar tasks individually in prior semesters. “It seemed to work pretty well- [the students] made lists and then I think we had them highlight words that

they actually used from the list in their rough draft, as I recall [and] in a different class I did a similar activity and some students got really into it” (SWS-021).

During our corpus working session, Simone and Nancy determined that the students would work in groups of three, and that each student would read one source article and prepare a written summary on it. They would present their summaries during discussion in their small groups. In that way, each student would have access to three sources on their topic to use in the activity. Simone noted during the corpus working session that time management, another of her concerns, would be an important factor during the lesson.

Simone: I was just writing down a couple of questions- potential complications and how to manage those- if they don't have an electronic copy, or if they're working alone, they just work alone, that's fine, but if they don't have a copy? They would have printed it out... I'm wondering if they would have saved it or sent themselves an email with it. Nancy: So the complication would be the time taken to go back and try to find the article. (SWS-046-047)

Simone also wanted to take the students through the process of getting a keyword list from their source text, using the Keywords Extractor tool on their individual student computer work stations. She wanted students to have a clear understanding of the process while also providing a source text available in case some students did not complete the necessary

homework for the activity. This preparation also would limit possible student disengagement for anyone who did not have the materials ready.

We could also put an article of something related to some topic and put it on [the online class management system], and if… there are those students who are not quite prepared, then they could still have access to something they could use in class to do the activity, whether it's for their topic or not. (SWS-052)

At that point, Nancy suggested that the model text that they would go over together as a group “could be one of those general things, and then that general source that we work on in class could be useful for their background paragraph” in order to make the modeling activity

useful for their final writing project (SWS-062). Simone and Nancy then considered topics from earlier writing assignments (culture, stress), other topics from the 1960s (such as the space race), and more general topics that might interest the students (the World Cup). They decided that they would start with keywords from a recent class reading on culture and then move to the topic of the World Cup.

Simone also tried to link the corpus-based activity to the broader goal of developing stronger vocabulary knowledge. “I just made a note 'looking at word forms' so that's sort of also a different way- a way of repeating the keywords but in different word forms” (SWS-076). For Simone, having this collaborative planning session allowed her to reflect on how to more fully integrate the activity into her lesson plan.

The teachers were trying to decide if they could focus on both keywords and AWL words in the same activity, because they felt both were important for the students. However, as they worked through the preparation for the class, they decided to focus solely on keywords, and look at AWL words in a later class. They planned to have students choose five words that they felt were important for their 1960s topic, and then create a list of 25 words from the Keywords Extractor tool. They would follow that with a discussion activity in which the students compare the two lists. The students would then make a new five-word list, incorporating the new

information from the Keywords Extractor keyword list that they would use for later writing activities.

Okay, from that list [of 25 keywords from the Compleat Lexical Tutor program] they can compare so if there's any from the same list... maybe they choose five, and if they have any that are on the 25, that's great, but if they have none from their own list, then they're going to choose from the new list and then.... they choose five to go there [the list on handout for further work] and see how they're used and then do some of their own writing examples, yeah? (SWS-131)

The students would then write original sentences using the keywords they had chosen At this point, Simone became concerned that we might be creating too many handouts and too many individual tasks, stating that “the difference in students doing this kind of thing, just checking it is probably enough [rather than writing on a new handout], but it seems like we often create more paper and more graphic organizers that really maybe aren't that necessary, depending on who it is, so I don't know’ (SWS-133).

She was also concerned about the time students would spend to produce and keep track of the assignment, as well as the time the teachers would have to spend providing feedback to the students on activities that might not be that closely connected to their final writing assignment. She felt that the more handouts students had, the more likely some of the less well-organized students might lose them. One option she suggested was to have students post their new

sentences using the keywords in an online class bulletin board. Simone also felt strongly that if students were going to put a lot of effort into this activity, then they should be getting clear feedback and points towards their grade. “If we spend time doing that in class, even if it's a brand new list, [we should give] them credit for having looked at the essay and identified the words” (SWS-169).

Nancy noted that the grading rubric for the final writing assignment already included points for descriptive academic vocabulary and word choice, and that one option would be to simply add keywords to that item on the rubric. Simone agreed, and it was clear that she felt it was important for students to see the value of the activity being reflected in the grade that they would receive on their final writing assignment.

After considering ways to introduce the concept of keyness, which would be new for these students, and ways to transition from one part of the activity to the next, Simone tried to

clarify how they would proceed with the main focus of the lesson, which was having students use the Keywords Extractor to find keywords in their source articles, and then connect it to their homework assignment.

You could say [to the students], ok, you're writing about your topic, what are some keywords- or just in general, so everyone can participate in the introduction- what are some keywords for the 1960s and then you make a list. And then, okay, we're going to come back to this. Let's work on the outline now. And they start working on their outline,